Web 2.0 - Discontinuity or Continuity? Guest Contribution by Frances Bell.

Frances Bell is a Senior Lecturer in Salford Business School: she blogs at elgg.

Paraphrasing Churchill (Russia becomes Web 2.0),

"I cannot forecast to you the action of Web 2.0. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is economic interest."  (adapted from http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/31000.html)

development and activities around the Internet continue to intrigue and excite those who engage with them; but the economics are less clear. As compared with the dotcom peak of March 2000, IT shares are -63.10% (according to S&P 500, Feb 2007), but +16.57% compared with March 2003. Tim O'Reilly's  definition of Web 2.0 started with a statement that cried out "fresh start":

"The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web."

So what is Web 2.0? Is it really something new? In a later definition, O'Reilly linked back to Tim Berners-Lee's original Web that he says is "is one of the most 'Web 2.0' systems out there".

So Web 1.0 is also Web 2.0 ?

Web 2.0 seems like advice to move on from the dotcom fallout. If we think about what is happening on the Web, the "read/write" web is becoming a reality with phenomena such as the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook, where users create content and link to each other.

Those developing software and services today are benefiting from lower infrastructure costs (hardware and Internet bandwidth) and from the availability of toolkits, many of them Open Source (i.e. license-free) software. In this more open environment, integration of both code and content is key. The term 'mashup' originates in music where music and vocals from different genres are combined together to make new piece of music. In Web 2.0, mashups can be of code and/or content, combined from more than source to provide an integrated experience for the user. Mashups may occur at the level of development where a developer may mashup code and data (see, for example, the UK property-finding web site Nestoria. 'Ordinary' users also mashup when they add content to and configure their spaces and themes on social networking sites. Users can combine content from 'home and away'.  They can  link  from their own published content  e.g. images, say on flickr; and upload their own content.  They can use content from others by including links, or by 'cut and paste', e.g. code 'widgets' that provide interesting interactive features to web sites or blogs. The key point here is that the distinction between developers and users begins to dissolve.

User appropriation and translation of technology is nothing new: in 1988 Fleck introduced the concept of innofusion, learning through struggling to use software, where requirements emerge from use rather than pre-exist the development activity (for more on this see Fleck's Innofusion or diffusation: the nature of technological development in robotics). Fleck's ideas are also discussed by Lin in this 2003 article on software innovation practices.

The concept of 'bricolage', building by trial and error rather than engineering, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage, has been used in Information Systems by Claudio Ciborra, in his book Labyrinths of Information 2002; and in studies of the Internet by Sherry Turkle (see for example this 1992 article by Turkle and Papert).

I contend that concepts such as innofusion and bricolage can help us to understand the use and development of web technologies without being prey to technological determinism (the idea that technologies change according to some inner logic outside any societal influence). So let's reject the term Web 2.0 as a concoction of economic interests, which is set for an eventual fall, and which is already coming in for criticism. Meanwhile web technologies continue to develop in new and interesting ways thanks to all of us along the user / developer spectrum - continuity not discontinuity!

Frances Bell - f.bell"AT"salford.ac.uk

Comments

[Donald Clark]

"So let's reject the term Web 2.0" and go for terms such as "bricolage" and "innofusion"!

Web 2.0 is a bottom up revolution and its economic manifestation came after the web exploded with user-generated content through blogs, wikis, digital phtography, podcasting, video sharing, social network tools etc.

Meaning is use and 'web 2.0' has meaning and USE. It's a living concept, coping with semantic shift and helping those who are stuck in old models of the web redefine its purpose. The terms 'bricolage' and 'innofusion' are on the outer reaches of obscure, academic language.

[Frances Bell]

Bricolage is a very practical idea, grounded in day to day reality of how we build from things close at hand, and fits very well with user-generated content. The read/write web is very exciting - I was suggesting we question what you call its economic manifestation. That can be part of redefining its purpose.

[Mark van Harmelen]

Let's start with a little history: Ward Cunningham developed and then publicly installed the first wiki during 1994-1995, as a tool for the communal recording of software patterns (a techie thing). Online diaries, from circa 1995, evolved and were sufficiently developed as a distinct type of software to be first called web logs, date unknown, and then known as blogs in 1997. [All dates here extracted from wikipedia; time constraints force this.]

These represent explorations in the use of web technology for new purposes building on, as Berners-Lee so rightly points out, features of what we now refer to as Web 1.0. [http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206.txt] These explorations represent a movement, if you will, away from the more static central publishing model of the early web, and towards an increasingly read/write web that allows the generation of user content.

Interestingly, TechWatch's new report on Web 2.0 [http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2007/03/news_web2,-d-,0.aspx] cites Berners-Lee's "Weaving the Web" where Berners-Lee made this read/write nature evident in his early Enquire software (1980). The read/write nature was then lost in the rush to adoption within CERN.

So it really took from 1991 to 1995 (from the public availability of the first web server on the internet to the first public wiki) for the read/write nature of the web to be recaptured. Subsequently we have seen a wider use of the read/write nature of the web in various forms; notably in what we now know as social software systems.

The growth of understanding of the potentiality of the read/write web is in my view the major advantage of what is now generally called Web 2.0. Why? Simply because this understanding enabled the establishment of social software. True, Web 2.0 doubters out there could argue that the roots of social software were in Internet forums (which I, if memory serves correctly, first remember encountering in an already developed form in somewhere in the mid to late eighties), but I believe that this perspective is wrong. Instead I advance that that the general development of social software is a direct result of an increased maturity of understanding of the web's read/write nature, spurred mostly by wikis and blogs as early examples of social software.

Why then is social software so important? At least in the developed countries, where there is sufficient capital and disposable income for computing equipment and bandwidth to homes and, increasingly, mobile devices, social software will revolutionise our lives. As an aside we have to pause for a moment and consider what revolutionise means in this context, not revolutionise in the way we engage in the fundamentals of human existence, those things which are perhaps connected with autonomic brain functioning, reproduction, and emotions such as love, jealousy and hate; or fairly fundamental societal phenomena such as war, peace, capitalism or socialism. Instead I use revolutionise as beyond these, as major influences on our lives.

Think for a moment about some technological advances: Money, the postal service worldwide, cars, trains, aeroplanes, electricity generation and distribution, the electric light bulb, radio, telephones, television, mobile phones (and later SMS texts). These have revolutionised our lives in significant ways, even to the way in which we shape our relationships with other people. Electricity and light bulbs enable us to shift (or extend) our social and working day from mostly daylight hours, easier travel and increased communication enable long distance relationships between couples, mobile phones enable business, txtin letz teens tlk more & b sortd (and adults use SMS texting too, for similar reasons, to sort out aspects of their lives).

In my view social software is a similarly significant technology that will massively affect our lives, changing the way in which we (in developed nations, at least) we go about organising our lives, relationships, and (importantly for readers of Fortnightly Mailing) learning habits. Couple this change with the media convergence that we see happening right now and the boundaries and potentialities for the change are massive. Examples of convergence: TV on phones, user generated content in broadcast media, commercial and user generated content becoming available for remixing and repurposing, interactive TV and radio, internet media TV and radio, and do-it-yourself ‘broadcasting’. Examples of the effects of convergence: Happy slapping, Indymedia, YouTube, what we as a society do with our time, and how we interact.

Is this view of the changing nature of organisation, of lives, relationships and learning taken seriously elsewhere? Yes, undoubtedly, but that would be the topic of an equally long comment on this post. Is it a topic of current research? How about the proposition that “We start with the Social Brain Theory which predicts that the size of groups is limited by our ability to handle social relationships. The larger the group the more time you have to spend getting to know people. Since time for social contact is inevitably limited, relationships in larger groups are less intimate. This makes larger groups less cohesive. We want to understand how social relationships work and how technology (e.g. texting, mobile phones, SMS) might make contact easier, so groups could become larger and more cohesive.” Sutcliffe, Payne, Howes [http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/ViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/D05088X/1].

So, apologies for a long digression and back to Web 2.0, lets look at just some of the components of Web 2.0 and their effects:

AJAX as a Web 2.0 component and as an enabler of change? AJAX is an interaction technology; it makes the web more interactive, easier to use, but really in itself makes little difference to the kinds of things discussed above.

Mashups, bricolage and innofusion as enablers of change? There is a role for mashups (although I think that we have some distance to go to easy and generalised user mashups), bricolage and (new to me) innofusion in the development of the new potentiality of the web for change. I speak for them, but I don’t regard them as THE central strand for change.

The read/write nature web as a component of Web 2.0 as an enabler of change? Undoubtedly, as THE central enabler, in that it is the prime enabler of social software. In my view this the major change enabler for the next twenty years and beyond. When we couple social software with media convergence and what is called the disappearance of the desktop / browser (the current trend for web-based applications interfaces to move away from PCs to phones and other consumer devices) the seeds of something of the scale of the industrial revolution are in our hands.

So I don’t dismiss Web 2.0; it’s a label, and an oft-confused one at that. But it is a convenient label, and it contains at least one enabler for a potentially huge revolution in the way we conduct our lives.

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Footnote: Although I haven’t read it completely as yet, for a different discussion of the components of Web 2.0 that is certainly more organised and complete than this ‘quick’ comment, please see the TechWatch report referenced above. Particularly with reference to the “big ideas of Web 2.0” which are proposed to be: Individual production and User Generated Content, harnessing the power of the crowd, data on an epic scale, architectures of participation, network effects, power laws and the Long Tail, and openness. Some of these ideas cut across what I write about here.

[Frances Bell]

Thanks Mark for this - maybe a case of the comment being more comprehensive than the post ;-) Thanks for the link to Techwatch report - it is excellent. It arrived in my inbox after I had written this post and a longer article on the topic.
I think that we agreed about everything but the use of Web 2.0 as a label.
My rejection of the term (though I do use it on occasion) was partly to be provocative, and partly to raise discussion on the economic issues. Some commercial interests may wish us to forget about the bad parts about the dotcom boom/ bust. Was it Santayana who said that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it? The World Wide Web has been an amazing revolution still in progress. Let's engage with and shape the technology.

[Donald Clark]

It is worth dwelling on the 2000 dot com phenomenon and what's happened since.

In education and training there were casualties but lots of companies went on to do very well, shaping the web and learning landscape. The market has served us well as almost all of the innovation has come from outide of the education sector, either through innovative private companies, raising capital on the markets, such as the Apollo Group, Google, YouTube, blogger, MySpace, Apple, Blackboard, Saba and Skillsoft (the list is long), or entities that exist outside of the traditional educational establishment such as Wikipedia.

The market corrected itself and continues to produce amazing innovations. Compare this to the massive investments in traditional education that have produced, at best, marginal improvements.

It may well be a 'concoction of economic interests...set for an eventual fall', but I doubt it.

[Frances Bell]

Donald,
You did not comment on the stock market figures I gave. Has the market corrected itself?
The point I was trying to make was that there are other ways of judging economic viability/success than company selling price but rather performance over time. Skillsoft is a case in point . If you look at their performance over 3 years http://boston.stockgroup.com/sn_overview.asp?symbol=SKIL you will see that the picture is not rosy.
However the picture for the read/write web is much more rosy, as long as we can avoid the hype ;-)

[Donald Clark]

The focus on average ignores the fact that there were many startups up in that period. These were new companies that created jobs and wealth that did not exist before. This has carried on. The total number of companies and therefore the total market capitalisation of these companies has continued to grow.